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NVIDIA's Release Happiness Continues Into April

04-06-2009, 06:20 PM

Phoronix: NVIDIA's Release Happiness Continues Into April

NVIDIA had ended out March with five Linux display driver releases with it ranging from a day to a week between updated Linux drivers were pushed out from this Santa Clara company. It's been just over a week since their last display driver release, but it looks like April will be another month of fierce Linux/Solaris/BSD driver updates from NVIDIA. This afternoon NVIDIA has pushed out the 185.19 Beta driver...

Comment

Wow, I think they're really trying to add salt to the wound with the recent negative news about AMD Linux drivers.

Honestly, from someone who uses only ATI cards, all these updates are looking awfully good.

But that is where I think AMD has the disadvantage with the press - it has this strict update schedule that it rarely moves away from, releasing drivers every ~30 days. Nvidia doesn't really seem to have that precise schedule, so they update their drivers whenever they see fit. One AMD release could have as many new features or fixes as five Nvidia releases.

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This is the force make me gradually changing all my ATI cards in favor of NV cards. ATI's empty promise is paying itself off. I think more people would switch to NV because their driver works flawlessly and using Linux desktop has moved from agony of lock ups, scrambled screens, flickers to slick and joy.

Comment

This is presented a bit one-sidedly. Quantity is not everything that's important, I think. I mean, theoretically you could take AMD's open source drivers and bump the release number on every little bugfix, since that seems to be what NVIDIA are trying to do with their driver.

They're trying to keep the cake and eat it -- keep their drivers closed, but create the illusion they keep you on the bleeding edge. That doesn't chance the fact you're pretty much forced to use a binary blob.

Even if NVIDIA releases a driver every single damn day, AMD's strategy is unarguably better.